


•pay no worship to the garish sun

by Echo (Lyrecho)



Series: A Better (?) Ending [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: ??? - Freeform, Fix-It, Gen, Not A Fix-It, Oneshot, Selfish Motivations, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-01
Updated: 2017-02-01
Packaged: 2018-09-21 08:22:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9539579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyrecho/pseuds/Echo
Summary: After the end, two stand together and both agree:"They deservedbetter."And so, no matter the consequences - regardless of the price - they're going to give them their happy ending.Even if it means watching the world die in their place.|Tumblr||Twitter|





	

Prompto wakes up breathing, which is a bit of a surprise.

He had, after all, died - at least, he's fairly certain that's what happened; one moment watching the sun break through the black of the sky for the first time in over a decade and then the next _agony_ as the chaos that had lived, writhing within him and bubbling always with malic just under the surface of his skin, hissed out and recoiled from the light - burning in the day and taking him with it.

His last thoughts had been bittersweet - he may have been leaving Ignis and Gladio behind, true, but after ten long years of nothing but hardship, he'd finally be with Noct again. From that perspective, everything was worth it, in the end.

But he's blinking, and the sky above him is blue, and the scent of salt and the cawing of birds tells him that he isn't quite dead, yet - that, or the afterlife was a weirder place than _he_ had ever imagined.

He pushes himself up from where he's laying flat on his back, reclines onto his aching elbows and looks himself over - no longer does he wear the colours of Lucis, dressed instead in simple jeans and a flannel shirt, which makes about as much sense as anything else going on around him, he supposes.

Wincing, he stands. It's not so much pain as it is a _rawness_ that floods his entire body as he moves, breathes - like someone had reached inside him with barbed wire and scrubbed away until they broke through bone to marrow. It's unpleasant and disorienting, but he's been through far worse. For now, at least, he can deal.

Squinting, Prompto marvels at the presence of the sun as he raises one hand to block the glare from his eyes, something he hasn't had to do for _forever_ \- only to freeze, shock mingling with horror in a cocktail cold as ice as he realises he _recognises_ the place he stands in.

"Angelgard," he says aloud, too shocked _not_ to.

And that's...definitely where he is. He hasn't seen the place they stashed Noct (in the crystal) in over ten years - even when Gladio and Ignis had made their way here to check on Noct and make sure the boat was still in running order, he'd always found a way to get out of it, finding the prison island itself just too...creepy - but he recognises it as clearly in the daylight as he did the ruined skyline of Insomnia in the darkness.

He stares for a moment, wondering at the cruelty of the gods, if this is truly what his afterlife is, and that's when _she_ speaks up from behind him.

"Oh," she says, and Prompto jumps about a mile in the air. "You're awake. Good."

He whirls, and standing behind him, at the edge of the shore that the waves lap against, is Gentiana - only _not_ , and Prompto gapes and blinks at the mysterious woman the others had once called a Messenger as she smiles at him, dressed as casually as he is in jeans and a pale green blouse a few shades lighter than her eyes - which are _open_ ; more than all of that, though, is the fact that she had spoken plainly with no hint of an accent beyond a normal Tenebraen one.

Prompto squints at her. His hand itches for a gun - the past ten years have taught him the value of caution - but he doesn't even try to summon. With Noct... _gone_ , all of their weapons had faded out of their hands, and only the timely arrival of the sun had saved them - or, well, saved Ignis and Gladio, since he still wasn't entirely convinced that he _had_ survived the dawn, and pseudo-Gentiana's presence here was doing little more than confirming that fact.

"And who are you supposed to be?" He asks, and as she blinks, realises that the screaming chorus that hasn't been silent within him for a single second since the sun set for ten years is no longer howling at him for blood and mankind's retribution - normally, by now, he'd have felt _some_ primal urge, heard _some_ whispers begging him for this woman's death - but, nothing. Nothing but silence.

He frowns in suspicion and pokes cautiously at the recesses of his own mind. No way had the dawn _itself_ somehow pushed them back far enough that he could no longer hear them - even before the night that had lasted for ten years had come, the daylight had never been enough to keep them completely under control. Their lack of _any_ sort of presence now was...unnerving, to say the least.

"Gentiana," the woman says. "Just not the Gentiana you met." She winks, and Prompto does his level best to emulate Ignis' unimpressed eyebrow stare of doom - a weapon in his arsenal that had only gotten stronger over the years, even with his lack of sight not telling him where to _aim_ said stare. "That Gentiana was...well, me, in a way, but I wasn't really there _consciously_ \- more like, just along for the ride." She laughs, low and bitter. "It _was _\- and this _is_ \- my body, though."__

Prompto blinks, and sees as he looks closer that for all the ink dark elegance the woman exuded, even dressed like a farmhand - she isn't the same ageless, timeless being of ethereal presence that the Messenger had been, all those years ago when she'd led Noct to Ramuh. "What do you mean?" He asks, accepting that this woman is - however crazily - telling, at least, whatever _she_ believes to be the truth.

She shrugs, the movement careless and flowing. "I was a follower of Shiva, once," she says. "Devout, too. And when Niflheim came, and slayed the Glacian...She came to me, and said She had a great need of my aid. I jumped at the chance to help my goddess - and for over a decade, She walked around in my body, pretending to be me." She holds out her hands, and the air around her fingers briefly crackles with magic as the air in her immediate vicinity drops to below zero.

"...I see," Prompto says, even though he _doesn't_ , not really - he's heard stranger things before, even if it hurts to think that, and Gentiana has no real reason to lie to him. "So...how are we here?" He blinks. " _Why_ are we here?"

Her eyes light up with a fervour that's almost frightening, and then she's right in his face, her hands wrapped around his forearms and her nails very nearly piercing through cotton and skin alike.

"We're here," she says, eyes locked on his, "because we're going to _fix _this."__


End file.
